Tuesday, September 10, 2013

So reads a headline in Gotham Schools' Rise and Shine. in fact, there is no science that can reliably evaluate teachers
on the scores of students they DO teach. The blatant absurdity of this headline is simply taken for granted. No one even understands this system. And that includes the people who designed it. Nonetheless, tens of thousand of teachers are placed in the position of going to work, and hoping kids they've never seen do well on tests.

And this is the world we live in. To make this system even more insane, nothing, but nothing, trumps test scores. If your principal thinks you are God's gift to education, it won't matter if those kids fail those tests. One thing I don't hear UFT boast about is the almost inconceivable part of the law that says "objective" data, meaning test scores, will trump all other data, meaning what you do each and every day.

The DOE, in its infinite wisdom, is dispensing PD. Everything I've heard suggests that the geniuses at DOE don't understand this system any better than the teachers to whom they explain it. They deflect tough questions, saying you have to speak to this department and that, and plod on doing whatever they can. Indeed, that's what we teachers are doing. All we can do is our jobs, and hope that whoever is teaching the kids on whom we'll be judged will get them test grades sufficient to keep us from being fired.

There's something fundamentally disgraceful about people whose jobs revolve around education indulging in voodoo and hoping it's of sufficient quality. There is no accountability. There is no pride. There is only data that indicates one teacher will be fired and another won't.

"Many teachers will be evaluated on test scores of students they never teach."

So reads a headline in Gotham Schools' Rise and Shine. in fact, there is no science that can reliably evaluate teachers
on the scores of students they DO teach. The blatant absurdity of this headline is simply taken for granted. No one even understands this system. And that includes the people who designed it. Nonetheless, tens of thousand of teachers are placed in the position of going to work, and hoping kids they've never seen do well on tests.

And this is the world we live in. To make this system even more insane, nothing, but nothing, trumps test scores. If your principal thinks you are God's gift to education, it won't matter if those kids fail those tests. One thing I don't hear UFT boast about is the almost inconceivable part of the law that says "objective" data, meaning test scores, will trump all other data, meaning what you do each and every day.

The DOE, in its infinite wisdom, is dispensing PD. Everything I've heard suggests that the geniuses at DOE don't understand this system any better than the teachers to whom they explain it. They deflect tough questions, saying you have to speak to this department and that, and plod on doing whatever they can. Indeed, that's what we teachers are doing. All we can do is our jobs, and hope that whoever is teaching the kids on whom we'll be judged will get them test grades sufficient to keep us from being fired.

There's something fundamentally disgraceful about people whose jobs revolve around education indulging in voodoo and hoping it's of sufficient quality. There is no accountability. There is no pride. There is only data that indicates one teacher will be fired and another won't.

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Views expressed herein are solely those of the author or authors, and do not reflect views of my employers, the United Federation of Teachers, or any UFT union caucus.

Stories herein containing unnamed or invented characters are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.